Burn a Poltergeist Story
by david.j.anderson.7
Summary: Under the black sky of a summer Cleveland night in 1969, a young waitress haunted not only by the effects of a recent trauma but an absorbing sense of alienation, must fight to find not just safety but sanity and peace.


Hopping whispers filled her ears as the bare foot woman scraped through tangles of the forest undergrowth. Bits of dry leaves clung to her sweaty ankles and feet. The dark brown soil ran around her lower shins and over her deep blue trouser. Her soles were raw but the pain of each step seemed to have disappeared since she crossed the freeway. She was exhausted, stumbling forward, straining her eyes to look through the dense night wooding. Her little hands trembled while clearing blood from above her brow. Red smeared across her forehead and glowed blackish in the moon light, which sifted in shafts of light through the wooded umbra above. Fat drops of blood dripped from her finger tips, down to the floor of Heights Park.

"_**Ohneka onekwenhtara, **__**oetseira cian."**_Floated into her mind or maybe out of her mind, the dumpy heaving waitress Jessica Siegal wasn't sure. The words were clear and raw, grating across her inner ear.

The strange crackling language had been retreating and crashing into her thoughts over the last few weeks. They saved her from the grease fire. They guided her out of the diner and then receded. At first she fought the current of emotions and impulses that washed into her head with the voice's words. She worried maybe this meant she had finally gone crazy but over the last few nights, they become the only thing that brought her a sense of security. Cooling her darting mind as the phone rang knowing it was surely her mother and eased her panicked thoughts as a distant fire engine's siren drew near.

She made it a point to remain thankful of all the support she had received after the accident. A part of her enjoyed the disconcerted looks and polite stairs people gave the burns on her hands when serving them a cup of coffee. Some customers seemed genuinely concerned while others just tipped her more. She had spent 23 years being particularly uninteresting and discernibly unnoticed. Though now people took a moment to recognize her, consider her story, even if it was one of tragedy. Her mother called it "Charity by pity." But her bubbe would have said "Better an ounce of luck than a pound of gold, love." Just two weeks ago Jessica had no gold and even less luck. During the moments she feared the worst of the sounds in her head, she comforted herself with the words of one sweet older lady who told her; "Take it as a blessing in disguise, dear." The scares like the voice had changed Jessica's life forever.

A mile into the park, Jessica knew the way to the water, even at night. The smell of the soapy stink had been lodged in her mind for a week or so. It was that frothy stew which had clouded her thoughts when she woke in the morning. She fixated on it and in those moments she partially thanked it for distracting her from her mind's wonderings. Thoughts like her last night at Raymond's Diner. Four months and Charlene had never spoken to her but Jessica was the inconsiderate one for not being "flexible" enough to cover fat Warren's mistress's shift.

"The best chili in Cleveland." she could hear Warren, Big Ray's son boast in the diner's cheap television ad.

"That rich son of a bitch can buy tv time but can't pay nobody real to come and clean this god damn grease trap." Those were Cliff's words. The image of him, and oddly slender middle aged Afro-American man hunched over, wrist deep in chunky brown goo, was one of those thoughts Jessica was happy to have swept out of her mind.

Hauntingly, those memories would drift back up to her while waiting on Harlem Ave for the bus to her new job. She would try to crowd out the noise with a continuous flow of selected thoughts. Jessica concentrated on to do lists and facts of general knowledge. She wanted to thank Mr. Hardit for taking her on so quickly. She needed to buy her mother some flowers from the Schmidt's or the apprehension would be palpable throughout her entire visit home. She couldn't believe she missed the last Star Trek or that it had been cancelled. She wondered what Curtis would say about the show being off the air. Curtis, Little Reggie and Cliff, she couldn't believe they were all gone. And on qui, Jessica's mind became flooded with strange sounds, violent sounds. Sounds like popping wood, bursting glass and the hum of a searing roar filled her head. Sometimes the taste of smoke and bacon would settle in her throat and come out with her next few exhales. The taste was buttery and dirty, it scared her and for good reason.

It was a black moon lit summer night and the sky seemed to hang low over the city of Cleveland. Still running in the park, Jessica's body seemed to ignore the pain driving up from her legs. She had come this far and there wasn't a moment's rest to be thought. Forward, the urge rode her onward through the warm night's air, between trees she weaved and sprang. A hard seizing pressure around her neck didn't allow her to check back over her shoulder, to look back at the sounds of breaking branches and barking dogs in the darkness behind her. Jessica didn't understand any of it but knew better to wait and find out why they were after her. As if possessed, her body trudged on through the forest brush, while her mind swam backwards to the man in the diner earlier that night.

He was a burly man with thick stubble covering almost everything from his cheek bones and down. Up until the fire most of her customers didn't even care to look at her when she approached their tables and at Skyline's it wasn't any different minus the few glances at her burns. It took Jessica four evenings on her new night shift at Skyline's to figure out her average customer wasn't going to be the talkative type. Mostly taxi men, drunkards and some working girls, none of them had any interest in small talk but this guy sank his brownish blond eyes deep into her as soon as he walked through the door. She felt his gaze lift the hairs on the back of her neck like a cold breeze and it never left her as she made her way to his booth.

"Hiyah doing sir. What can I get yah?" She politely asked, playing her discomfort into her order pad.

"You shouldn't be here." The man harshly declares in a somber tone, while leering intensely into the young girl's pudgy face.

An uncomfortable smile slowly stretched across Jessica's face as the words of the rough looking man registered. She felt a flustering blush swirl around her cheeks. "I'm sorry, what was that sir?" Jessica bashfully asks, retreating.

"She died in that fire and so should've you." The man rebutted in a snort. His face lingered in between the statements, waiting for her reaction.

"I, I" Jessica muttered as her chest swelled and tighten. A flash of heat rushed over her body, coming to ball just behind her eyes.

"Say it witch! You've returned." The sharp enunciation of the "tch" sound struck harshly against the waitress, driving her back a shuffle. Jessica felt the taxi driver in the corner booth pull his eye's up to on-look.

"We still remember the flames and you have no place here." The man's charging words matched his rasping tone, which rose as if he were suppressing a shoot.

"I feel for your people and understand vengeance perfectly but not again. It's our city now and you must remain with death." And with a short utterance of the word "death", the man stood, towering over the doughy waitress, clad in her blue and white uniform.

Wobbling pools of tears clung to her eyes as she looked down to the floor and up to the man's barrel chest. He was a large, welling in muscle and untamed bodily hair, which thrust out from under his t-shirt collar. Jessica stumbled backwards placing herself against a counter top stole as the man snarled, examining her up and down.

"Hey mutha fucka! You gonna need to take that shit outta here! You copy me jack!" Yelled the taxi driver scooting himself out from around his table.

The hulk of a man didn't seem to even detect the presence of the approaching driver. His yellow eyes scrutinized Jessica until she unwittingly met his piercing gaze. Locked into a moment's stare, the man's pupils shrank into tiny black dots, as a flash of white blinked over Jessica's vision. With the taxi driver feet away, the big man indignantly reeled back, curling his upper lip and with an inhale, he muttered "It's true." and marched out the diner door.

"Hey you ok miss?" The taxi driver asked as he turned to face Jessica. The young waitress was attempting to cover her face with both hands. The whole diner sat quiet as Jessica stood seemingly sobbing, allowing small wisps of stream to raise from in-between her fingers.

Two hours and $6 dollars later Jessica never made it to the Ten Bus. As soon as she exited Skyline's the uneasy feeling which had been whirling inside her since the confrontation sank into the pit of her stomach and rammed against her spine. Deja vue coursed over her as the summer night's sky opened up to reveal a crescent moon. A familiar tension gathered around Jessica's head, and then her ears popped.

"_**Ichar! Ichar! Dadeneye ichar! Sasoron cain**_**!"** The expressions rapped over and over at the base of her skull. Although the words were completely alien, she knew what they meant and more importantly, what she had to do.

"_**Dogs! Thieving dogs! Hurry girl**__!" _broke repeatedly against her thoughts, alarm submerged any other option than to run for Heights Park. Run for the Crooked River, for the Cuyahoga.

It wasn't till she reach Euclid did she hear the first baying of howls off in the distance. Then her breath seized in her chest, her throat and a light headed rush swelled her brain.

"_**You will make it. You must make it girl. They cannot stop me."**_The hollow voice carried her on. Lifting her up to her feet after a panicked sprawl sent her tumbling down an embankment, yards from the park's tree line. A dizzy throbbing sprang from a gash which etched itself on her scalp.

Feet into the tree ling, Jessica's body was forced to the ground as a bullet exploded into a sapling just ahead of her. Her soft blue blouse snagged thick stickers, their thorns catching her skin underneath her uniform. She yanked threads of her own hair free as she scampered to her feet losing one of her slip on shoes. She could feel sets of amber eyes behind her, searching her out amongst the brush and trees.

Everything to her back was terror, sheer and direct the voice insisted, refuge was in the river. It was the only impression that was allowed to roll over in Jessica's mind, so she kept running in a mad dash. Repeatedly whipping her face on thin elm branches, she steadied herself against the tree trunks she darted by. Meeting each tree with a steady open palm, the squat girl tumbled through the foliage. A second shoe was lost as her foot caught along a downed log, sending the young women slamming shoulder first into a large oak.

"_**Up!"**_ roared her host in a grisly impatient tone.

The taste of charred bacon began to well up into her mouth as she caught sight of the brown water's edge. Smelling the thick frothy swill of industrial waste and garbage which packed the Cuyahoga, Jessica eased her stagger forward. Composing herself, she drug her feet down to the bank of the river. Streams of glossy ooze bobbed along the water's surface as oil streaks glistened underneath the crescent moon's glow.

A railway car labored heavily, clunking and clattering to Jessica's right .The rail cars screeched and whined as it motored along the Norfolk and Westin Railway Bridge. Jessica had stopped breathing or at least she thought she had, as her toes slipped into the cool still channel. The stench of the creamy black slug seemingly disappeared as she wade knee deep in the pitch black waters. Her body trembled as the specter moving underneath her skin, calling up warmth from the bones in her legs and guiding her feet further into the Cuyahoga. Jessica thought of the grease fire.

Although it was a temperate summer night in Ohio, the water was brisk on her skin. She gasped for a breath as the shocking cold river inundated her pant legs. Greasy oil and a waxy mixture of bulbous bits of trash swam out around her. Underneath the blanketing expanse of the black night's sky, illuminated by a leftward hooked moon, the young waitress stood submerged to her upper thighs in the black river waters of the twisting Cuyahoga mouth.

A silent breeze swept across Jessica's back, floating along the river's surface, underneath her finger tips, as she looked out across the opening of the Cuyahoga, far out onto the black plain of the great lake in front of her. It was an ocean of darkness, separated by the distant dotted lights from trade frigates northern bound and the glowing beam from the wayward moon. For a moment her eyes, breath and mind drifted out with that breeze.

Violently, her vision refocused as fiery twitches ripped across the girl's belly. Pulling her hand from her blouse pocket, Jessica's thumbs hesitantly pried open the front flap of a match book. Leaping sparks zipped and darted inside her as she eased herself, waist deep into the murky waters. Muddy thatches of soft twigs and drowned leaves rose up around her naked feet on the river's floor.

A rail car caring molten steel across the bridge spewed embers into the starless night's sky. Jessica folded over the match book cover, Skyline Diner etched in red, white and blue along the front. Catching a single match in between the ignition strip and her finger she pulled and glared as the yellow flame's light sank deep into the blackness of the polluted waters. Her throat seemed to dry and crack as if a blistering soar ran up it. The fresh phosphate smell of the burn met with the arid air in her nose and neck. Her gaze sank deep into the body of the flame, watching the golden light reach up towards her eyes, while the blue flame consumed the grey paper stick. A mesmerizing sequence of thoughts and feelings pulsated from the smoldering lump of charred filament which fermented in Jessica's throat. She smiled as the yellow and light blue flames came together to set the entire book ablaze.

The young woman was a glow as dams of shimmering tears slide down her cheeks. Jessica felt an eon of frustration and bewilderment ripple along her face. Her mind gushed with wafts of rage, unfathomable and maddening rage. Mental pictures erupted and vaporized in her mind. Broken scenes flashed of Raymond's Diner ablaze mixed with Warren's fat face, overlapped with the screams of Curtis, Little Reggie, Cliff and her own.

The blinding rage filled ever inch of her skin and burst out from her very essence. The waters of the Cuyahoga boiled about her body as a syncing overtone of Jessica's voice and that of her traveler's spoke as one in a gargling hiss of a pronouncement;

"_**Let them all burn…"**_

Jessica casually dropped the burning pack of matches into the river in front of her. Waves of orangey gold flames instantly feathered out along the surface. The stretching blaze reached out to the shoreline behind her and jutted onward upstream, a lake of fire manifested in front of her. Purple and white waves of fire offered up reddish yellow flames and accents of a chemical green, which exhaled thick billows of poisonous grey smoke. Laps of the inferno craned up the young woman's body as she looked out onto the fiery stream's expansion. Within seconds the girl's blouse and blue trousers seared off her now bare body. A broad layer of ditch black smoke swaddled Jessica's entire head, leaving her naked square body illuminated in a kaleidoscope of dancing flames.

Unblemished, Jessica stood still in the crucible; she closed her eyes and allowed the putrid smoldering plume to enter her mouth, throat and lunges. As the hot gases filled her body, out came a smoky visage of a giant being. Up through her back and shoulders, the specter materialized and intermixed with the dense pyroclastic cloud just above the river. It pulled itself into a shape of a large humanoid figure. Withered and fried, its form was that of dwindled body, its skin replaced by flaky charred flesh. Cakey lumps of dry sinew were blackened and melded onto a skeletal frame of a woman. Twisted and stiffly fused together, its legs were the product of some intense inferno. Crowning the manifestation was a smooth bald scalp, hairless and covered in large gray flakes of ash. The geist's face was replaced by crunchy bits and bulges where a brow, chin and cheeks once were. Empty burned out eye sockets were ringed with speckled embers, which dimmed and relit continuously. Smoldering light bending columns of heat pullulated from the beast's mouth as it gapped its crackling maw.

The deathly beast looked out upon Lake Erie hissing ancient Iroquois curses, learned to it in death. The immense poltergeist steeped itself in the raging conflagration, multiplying the inferno along the water's surface. The scorching blaze parted the waters around the two women in a cone of steaming dark vapor. Incarnated twigs lay charred on top of crystallized sand at Jessica's feet.

For Jessica, the world seemed to shake in the stroking roar of the fiery tempest around her. It was all completely unimaginable to her, yet cleansing. Lines of restraint fell away as small notions and memories of neglect fueled a visceral fury. So many people never lifted their eyes, met her searching smile, returned her kind gestures, friends ignored her voice, her mother and the fat face of Warren developed into a taste. She wanted to resist throbbing impressions of hatred and retribution but those inhibitions were consumed by a furor of indignity. She attempted to separate the feelings, knowing they weren't hers but she couldn't completely deny them. She couldn't ignore the many nights she cried herself to sleep from the pain and anxiety of anonymity and loneliness. A youth of frustration and guilt which drove her out of from her mother's roof and demoralizing stare. The ever lurking draw to revenge for the swindler who sent her grandmother to die in the poor house. No they too were her's to share and she no longer had a reason to disguise them. Within that moment, Jessica tilted her head up to the manifestation above her and gave her screaming voice to it.

Just minutes after Jessica struck the first match; the sweltering being raised its charred and seared arms to the night's sky. Feeling the city of Cleveland around it once again, it released a booming declaration for all the denizens of the Lake Erie shore tundra to hear. Spilling its spirit into its words, the entity channeled its chilling message up a river of time to the restless graves of her rapists, murders and eradicators.

"_**Behold me Mad Anthony. Behold me once again... It is you who deserve to this. And all your children shall burn."**_


End file.
